INSTALLMENT TWO - MEJ's BIO (The Early Years)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The early years

Perhaps the first story about my life should be the one about the night of my birth. My parents told me that it was a very hot night, which was not unusual since I was born on the fourth of August (in the year 1900). It was also very humid that night so the mosquitoes were having a ball. Window screens in those early days were not as well made as they are now, and the little pests were finding their way into the bedroom through the screens. So my father went out to get some paint for the screens, which stopped that invasion. Incidentally, I am still a very popular target for the mosquitoes we have now in the summer time. If anyone wonders why I was born here at home, it was because the only transportation then was by horse power. Automobiles were non-existent and hospitals were not within driving distance. Even doctors were very scarce.

My father farmed the same 240 acres that we now own. It took much longer to do the same amount of work in those days than it does now. My father always had a hired man to help with the field work during the summer. This extra man was always hired from the first of March until the corn was picked. That date was uncertain and could be any time from the first of November until as late as the first of January, depending on the weather. Of course, when my brother and I were old enough to take over some of the work the hired man was supposed to do, he was no longer needed.

During the years when I was old enough to work with horses, we always had at least fourteen horses, plus one or two horses that were used only on the road. These were the ones used to pull the one-horse buggy, the surrey and the buckboard. They were not used for field work except when it was absolutely necessary. Perhaps they could be called "Sunday" horses. The tame old team that I remember best was a pair called George and Nance. Of course, their names were pronounced with a Low German twang, so it came on “Yorts un Nence.”

Old Yorts was quite a horse, though. As was our custom, all the horses were turned loose in the barn yard after supper in the summer time for a good roll and a bit of grass before being put back in the barn for the night. One night when all the horses had bunched up some distance from the barn, it was time for them to go in. My older sister, Ann, and I were standing directly in the path they would take to the barn. I got out of the way but Ann panicked and fell down directly in front of Yorts, but Yorts took off with a prodigious leap and landed at least ten feet beyond where Ann lay, unable to move because of fright. Could it be possible that this incident had something to do with Ann’s height? You have all heard of being scared out of a year’s growth; she did not get very tall.

One evening just at dusk, I was told to go on an errand to my uncle’s place just a fourth of a mile away. When I had reached about the halfway point, a coyote in the neighborhood began howling to his mate a mile or so away. This coyote howl is a sound that can make a coward out of almost anyone, so with this sound in the air, I became a quivering little boy almost too scared to move. But I was also sure that if I went back without doing what I was supposed to, it might be a little difficult to sit down comfortably for a while. So, with a lot of loud whistling to keep the old courage up, and a lot of hard running, the mission was completed.

 

School life

Our family life when I was a child was like that of any other family of the community, in that almost all of the neighbors near enough for us to be acquainted with were of Low German Descent and always spoke the Low German dialect. Because of this, every child, when entering school, found out that there was a language other than the one used at home; that is, the American language. What happened then was that as soon as the children were outside the schoolroom, they all spoke their home language, Low German. The first teacher that made the rule that only the American language could be spoken on the school ground and then tried to enforce it, almost lost her job because of it. It was the parents more than the children that objected. They claimed it was none of the teacher’s affair which language the children used when they were outside the schoolhouse.

School laws in the early days did not say at what age or in what grade a pupil could quit school. If you were through the sixth or seventh grade you could safely stay home and forget about school. I believe I was the first one to graduate from the eighth grade in our district. Soon after that the old school building was sold, converted into a grain bin and a new school house was built. I have often wondered if there could be any connection.